The God of West Egg
by Ragingstillness
Summary: Someone on tumblr requested it, so here, voilà, I have written it. This is the Great Gatsby Zades AU. I am barely coping with the most recent episode so I hope this warms the hearts of every Zades fan.
She sat down so very lightly on the edge of his bed. I almost thought she didn't believe it to be there. It did resemble a cloud remarkably, what with all the excess throw pillows flung casually over the whole ridiculous length. I would never know why a man of his status felt violently pastel pillows to be necessary in his collection but it really was only another one of the man's eccentricities.

She was wearing a green dress today, a color I suspected would look terrible on a woman with so vibrant hair but somehow she managed it, as gracefully as she managed anything, Miss Zelena Mills did.

Her sister, the ever stringent Miss Regina Mills, was to be out of town, enjoying, it was rumored, being Mrs. Regina Mills with her husband, the agriculture mogul. With her out my usually preoccupied neighbor saw fit to invite us both into his home, that I had previously only seen under the tell-tale red spotlights of one of his parties.

Only the most restless in town came to the parties and while no invitation was needed, it was the height of disrespect, social suicide really, to leave before the host allowed you, with a pat on the back and an uncharacteristically sheepish running of his hand through his shocking azure hair.

But back to the present. He came into the room after her, staring visibly up and down her body, but it wasn't sexual. Indeed he seemed amazed she was there at all and was enjoying just the absence of empty air in the space she now occupied.

He approached where she sat, in the exact middle of the ostentatiously huge room, and roamed around her, approving her location with a simple nod. She moved to follow him with her eyes, barely turning her head, so caged by her inherited propriety. Whenever their eyes touched his softened in a way that made him all too understandable, and made me want to leave the room immediately.

His prowling look led him patiently to the staircase leading up to the balcony and he took the steps suddenly, as though he was attempting to convince her he had always been up there and the distance between their bodies had never closed so tightly as to make me believe a single move would have pulled them fully over the edge of love.

She tilted the small black bowler hat with a green bow up from her eyes, opening the vulnerable pale blue irises to sunlight titrated through the skylight's stained glass. The area right above the pillow was clear, the stained glass having been neglected for a single circle of phosphorescence that served to illuminate a monogrammed H in the very center.

"Your house is so very beautiful, Lord Hades."

Her voice was clear as the very sunlight, but full of delicate volume, and garnished with a slight English accent she may have picked up from an overseas trip.

He bristled at the title she gave him and moved quickly to counter the lack of intimacy, insisting, "Hades, please. Just Hades. And thank you My Lady, I do my best."

She laughed softly but it was very dry, with that claylike quality that made sure the listener knew it came from the mind and not from the heart.

"Now look who is pandering. Zelena, please. We have known each other much too long for anything less."

The last part was said quietly and heavily implied as something I should not be hearing so I bowed out unobtrusively but hung behind a curtain, listening. I had never been a proponent of eavesdropping, I considered it a despicable practice, but a certain corrupt loyalty to my new friend and neighbor soothed any conscience I had left around the two of them.

He nodded in response to her statement and flushed slightly. I was amazed. What kind of woman, what kind of witch was she, to turn the demure yet masterful man into a young lad with a schoolboy crush?

She moved her seductive gaze from his eyes and swept it over the walls of the balcony itself and the myriad shelves carved into the wall and more button ups than the man would ever need folded neatly in each.

"You have so many shirts, Hades."

The statement seemed nonsensical but it moved the conversation on and she was obviously enjoying saying his first name, when so many had feared to say it in the past. He laughed lightly, again more from the mind than the heart.

"I have a man in Strasbourg who buys my clothes."

Any amity that had existed had only lived for the duration of his speaking and soon fell to its deathbed after.

Struck by an impulse, my debonair friend reached for a handful of the shirts and flung them down to her. She reached up freely to grab them, falling from her prim position on the edge of the bed to lie recklessly on the spread. Her hat fell slightly to the side on her head but to his apparent delight, the eyes that looked back up at him were full of girlish ecstasy.

He rushed along the walkway, grabbing a bunch of silk lined vests and flinging them with both hands towards the bed. She flung her stilettos off and got up on her knees to make sure they landed in her slender fingers. Her back hit the sheets with unnecessary force but the impact was purposeful and I had a sudden recollection of my childhood on a playground.

The vests ran out rapidly and my friend's wing tipped onyx shoes tip tapped in a kind of skip to the next alcove where he tossed down an endless array of ribbony ties. She caught every single one, then flung them back up into the air, crashing into those he was still relieving the cabinets of. The shining air from the skylight slowed the motion allowing the flurry of clothing to spin in the dust, falling over and onto the slender shoulders and oceanic hair of my friend's love.

As all things do, this one too came to an end, where he leant over the railing panting but exuberant while she laid back on the bed, her stockinged feet still hanging over the edge.

She arched her back artfully and stretched those beautiful freckled arms over her new blanket of silky wealth. They slid through her fingertips and he seemed to grin brighter with every little stroking of her curious mind.

When the lighted air in the room had reclaimed its place in his lungs, my friend rushed back down the balcony steps and approached the bed where she lay, kneeling as if in prayer at its side. And it really was prayer for even a man of little romance like me could see the religion in his eyes as they combed over the haphazard folds of her dress like so many gentle fingers.

With ease she flipped onto her stomach, swimming her hands through the piles one more time before folding them smugly under her chin and smiling up at him as a woman never smiled but in the presence of her equal.

My breath caught in my throat at the sight. I had thought I was witnessing love here, that of a husband and wife, but what I could now see was even more powerful. They weren't in love, the way one can claim they are tied to another and experiencing emotion when that person is around; they were lovers, living through love in every moment of their lives, breathing it from each other's lips when they saw themselves reflected in the other's eyes.

Even though they could not possibly know I was there, I blushed, ashamed to be watching.

His hand came up off the bed, and slowly moved forward. He was pushing the limits of society, for she had been promised away by her mother and both the bigots and barmaids expected her to keep to that iron will. Yet there was nothing more purely logical, and sensible than the way his fingers carded into her hair and how her eyes drifted closed as she leaned into the sun kissed warmth of his palm.

She moved her face against it and I saw her manicured fingernails dig into handfuls of the ties, until one of them came up and vainly tried to cover her mouth. Her eyes opened but didn't focus on him, trailing over the spread of vests, shirts, and ties she had made up the bed with. The hand over her mouth began to tremble and I was amazed to see her blue eyes blur at the corners with the children of tears.

My friend was immediately alarmed and leaned forward, much further than he'd even allowed himself and use the hand caressing her cheek to bring her face up to his eyes. His other hand moved forward and lost itself in between her fingers.

"Why are you crying, Zelena?" He asked, his voice as low and gorgeous as the first time I had heard it but somehow more beautiful than ever in the concern of his lover's tone.

She lifted those silently sobbing eyes to his and they held a look, one I will never be able to forget for as long as I walk this earth. It was a loaded expression and one only that singular woman was able to give and ever will be able to again. I have difficulty putting its meaning into words but the closest I can come is that she was seeing him. She was looking at him and she was seeing him. Really seeing him, seeing every part of him, more intimately than if they were lying together. And it broke her heart, what she saw, some piece of him I hadn't yet discovered. It said everything to him and while I heard nothing at all, he did, and rushed to cover up that part of him from her sorceress's eyes. He did not succeed.

Her hand came down from her mouth and those painfully pink lips spoke the truth.

"It's so beautiful, Hades. All of this. It makes me sad. I've just never seen anything so beautiful before."

He understood more than I ever could and made the perfect decision to kiss the tears from under her eyes, after which I had to leave that room for tragedy of them.


End file.
